Fire Fire

Last night just as everyone, except Anna, had got off to sleep she managed to set off the fire alarm upstairs, the first time it’s ever gone off and through a pretty weird series of events.

Anna was in the bath, relaxing by candle light when all the wax managed to ignite somehow (pic below) shocked by the resulting ‘huge’ cracking flame she rushed to get her sister, who was asleep and unresponsive, so in growing panic she decided to throw a cup of water at the candle.  The result was burning wax being splashed over a large area of the tiled wall which triggered the fire alarm that eventually woke us all up, by the time I’d eventually woken up the fire had burnt itself out.

Anna now knows to throw a wet cloth over the fire, but it was pretty weird, we’ve used hundreds of similar candles over the years we’ve never seen the whole thing ignite.

All the excitement meant I didn’t get back to sleep until past 2am, but on the plus side I managed to finish my current book The Gates of Rome the first volume of a sequence of 5 novels about Julius Caesar.  It was a good book, but the subsequent volumes promise to be even better.  I’m a sucker for novels about the ancient world, their achievements, ambition and culture always amazes me.

As a result of the late night I switched off the alarm and woke up exactly 8 hours later at 10am.  I was headed into Preston today so I parked up down by the river and enjoyed the fairly long walk along the river and up through the park to Caffe Nero where I did my reading and email for 90 minutes before a shorter walk down to the offices.  My main meeting was a review of our service desk optimisation activities and whilst some areas are on temporary hold, some of the others are progressing nicely, although there was still plenty to discuss.  

In many of these sessions I find that it’s incredibly important to thoroughly understand why we are doing something, how we are differentiating from what others can do, why we choosing a particular implementation approach, what unique value we can add rather than just getting carried away by technology options.  I love having these ‘framing’ discussions in part because I see so many projects that don’t have them early enough and drift along as a result.

I’m meant to be fasting today so by the time I got finished in the office at 5pm I was getting pretty weary and I was pleased that I’d been tempted by the big bowl of team fairy cakes! I burnt off those calories walking back to the car through a very dark Avenham Park.

Debbie and I are watching the Bletchley Circle tonight, it was recommended by my Mum and the first episode was real class, although I was continually annoyed by the way women were treated after the war (of course the programme makers go out of their way to make that point)